from an Information Sheet produced by the Vegetarian Society UK:Mr
A F Hills was the first chairman [of The Vegeterian
Federal Union] and Mr R E O'Callaghan was secretary. Mr Josiah Oldfield
became secretary in 1896, and in 1897 a second International Congress
took place in London.

Extract from The Claims of Common Life:

To say that science can harden or degrade man in his relation to animals
is to malign the most sacred of all studies. The village lout may stick
a cock-chafer on a pin, or tie a cracker to a panting, fear-stricken cat,
or throw a pup into a pond and stone it till it sinks exhausted. A cruel
woman may drive or spur the tired horse till it drops, or leave a mouse
to die of hunger in a trap, etc. The swell sportsman may wound and torture
and kill his hundreds of beautiful pigeons, and leave a piteous leasing
of wounded animals slowly dying in the hedges and in their holes - dying
of acute inflammation, after he has passed on with his gun. The woman
of fashion may order men to go out to the Arctic regions and flay the
half-dead seal and leave it wallowing in blood and groans - a mangled
mother with its little ones pitifully bleating round the frightful object
hour after hour till they die of slow starvation. The butcher may perpetrate
all the horrors of the slaughterhouse for gain. But to the true scientist
all such atrocities are impossible . . . The higher science - opposed
to popular marvel hunting and self-advertising - is always reverent in
the presence of the reverent in the presence of the mystery of life. The
lowest animal must ever be treated with the respect which is its prerogative.
Science elevates and does not degrade the position of the animal world,
and the final point I would make is that science increases the rights
of animals by deepening the rights of man. The higher the position in
which science can place man, the nearer to the source and fount from whence
the laws of the universe proceed, the greater and deeper will be the reverence
for animal life, because the clearer and fuller will be the conception
of the higher forces of amity over enmity in evolution. The lower the
man the more cruel is he to his beast of burden, the higher the man the
more nearly he approaches to those heights of scientia and gnosis, which
are the crowning stamp of the true scientist, the more reverence he has
for his fellow traveller - a true brother in the eyes of science - on
the same spiral pathway of vitality, towards a perfection of evolution.

from a letter by George Bernard Shaw to Symon Gould of the American
Vegetarian Party, in 1945:
Please stop telling the blazing lie that vegetarians are free from disease.
Ask Josiah Oldfield (if you have not heard of younger authorities) whether
he can cure rheumatism, or arthritis, or cancer. I know of no disease
from which vegetarians are exempt.